The purpose of this blog is to provide analytical commentary on formal and informal labour organisations and their attempts to resist ever more brutal forms of exploitation in today’s neo-liberal, global capitalism.

Thursday, 28 March 2013

European trade unions and the Struggle for Public Services

Against the background of the global financial
crisis and the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis, the public sector and services
have come under heavy restructuring and privatisation pressure across Europe.
In this guest post, Christoph Hermann
assesses a variety of different strategies, European trade unions have adopted
in defence of the public sector. Ultimately, he argues, the strengthening of
the link between service producers and service users has to be at the centre of
a successful strategy of resistance.

Photo by habeebee

The public sector is a key battleground for a
progressive trade union strategy and for an alternative to neoliberalism in
Europe. On the one hand the existence of a public sector is a continuing example
that a not for profit driven production of goods and services is not only
possible in the 21st century; it is also be preferable. On the other
hand in many countries the public sector is the last stronghold of organised
labour. Even though public sector workers are under continuous pressure, in
many places they still enjoy significant job security and comparably decent
employment and working conditions. The importance of the public sector can also
be seen in the fierce attempts to sell off the remaining public assets in the
crisis countries in Southern Europe. In other parts of Europe the public sector
has suffered from excessive welfare cuts included in the austerity packages. However,
the current attack on the public sector is only the latest chapter in a long
struggle for public services. In this struggle European trade unions have
adopted a variety of strategies to defend the public interest.

Initially many public sector unions called for
strikes to prevent privatisation. However, strikes rarely stopped politicians from
proceeding with their plans. Supporters of privatisation –
including major right-wing newspapers – portrayed striking public sector
workers as selfish and backward looking, defending an outdated and
deteriorating system. What supporters did not mention was that the poor state
of many public services was not the result of workers’ ignorance or the lack of
competition. It was the result of years of underfunding, following right-wing tax
cuts and austerity policies. However, since the unions rarely raised the
problem of service quality, pro-privatisation arguments resonated well in the
public, weakening the support for the striking workers. Strikes were also
problematic for another reason: Since the disruptions mostly hurt service users,
they alienated the most important allies in the struggle for public services.

Following the defeat of strikes, unions frequently
turned to concession bargaining. Initially they negotiated early retirement schemes
and golden handshakes to avoid forced layoffs; later this was complemented by
the acceptance of pay cuts and other losses for newly hired workers. The
problem with concession bargaining is not only that once the process has started
it is difficult to stop it – many union reps believed that the threat would be
over after a first or second round of concessions, only to find out that
management always came back and asked for more later. Since the ‘give backs’
were not distributed equally among staff members, concession bargaining also
introduced splits in a previously relative homogenous workforce. The splits emerged
between ‘older’ and ‘younger’ workers as well as between core and outsourced
staff (the latter employed by subsidiaries or private partners). Fragmentations
are particularly harmful because they undermine workplace solidarity and
thereby weaken the capacity of trade unions to withstand further threats.

Photo by habeebee

The abolition of public sector monopolies and
the admission of two and more providers forced public sector unions to start
organising workers at competing work sites. For many public sector unions this
posed a double challenge: Since public companies often operated as quasi closed-shops
with new employees automatically joining the union, union staff had little
experience with organising new members. At the same time workers at the
competing service providers were different from the traditional workforce. They
were young, female and in many cases had a migrant background (in several
countries migrants were excluded from the public service if they were not in
possession of the national citizenship). Existing union staff had problems to
connect with them. There were some promising attempts to bridge the divide –
including Ver.di’s campaign in Germany to organise the new competitors in the postal
sector – but the cultural differences proved rather persistent with the effect
that new competitors still have much lower unionisation rates than the former
monopolies.

In addition to striking and organising, public sector
unions also put considerable effort in lobbying. At first, they lobbied their
national governments to delay privatisation processes; later on lobbying
focused on the European Commission and the European Parliament with the goal to
ensure that social provisions were included in the European liberalisation
directives. Such provisions, for example, allow authorities to take employment
conditions into account when they tender public service contracts. There were
some successes as in the postal and transport directives, but in general the
language remained vague and the adoption of effective measures was left to the
member states. The European Federation of Public Service Unions (EPSU) also
failed to reach the adoption of a public service directive, which would have
excluded public services from the scope of the internal market.

Photo by HatM

Given the limited success of earlier
strategies, trade unions started to experiment with new forms of resistance. First
they realised that without public support they will not be able to stop
privatisations. Then they found potential allies in a number of social
movements and civil society groups that opposed privatisation because of the
negative effects for service users. The most prominent example is the mass
protest against the Bolkestein Directive, which led to exclusion of healthcare from
the legislation. Similar activities took place on the national and local level
– including a series of referenda against the privatisation of health care and
water. The positive outcome of these campaigns makes it clearly a more
successful strategy than the traditional forms of struggle. However, sometimes the
success proved temporary. In several cases politicians came back with a new plan
for privatisation. The contingent nature of the outcome makes this strategy extremely
resource intensive. Trade unions and their partners not only have to spend
considerable time and money to build the initial campaign, they also have to
keep the coalition together and sustain the interest of the supporters even after
the campaign goal was met.

While in
the past most of the campaigns were defensive in the sense that trade unions
and allied groups fought off the threat of privatisation, there are also an
increasing number of pro-active campaigns – such as EPSU’s ‘turning the tide’ –
demanding a renewal and strengthening of the public
sector as an alternative to the private economy. At the local level such
campaigns were aiming at taking back privatised services into the public realm.
The result was a series of ‘re-communalisations’ of water and waste services,
after municipalities had found out that privatisation rarely improved service
quality, but almost always was more expensive than public provision. ‘Re-communalisations’
are extremely important as examples of effective alternatives to privatisation.
However, except for the nationalisation of failing banks (which had other
reasons) de-privatisations have so far been limited to the local level. As such
they hardly challenge the general thrust of privatisation in Europe.

Another set of strategies (which so far have mainly
been used outside Europe) combine traditional tactics with new objectives. Collective
bargaining cannot only be used to improve working conditions. The improvement
of service quality can also be made a bargaining task. American nurses, for
example, negotiate staff-to-patient-ratios as part of their collective
agreements. In a similar way, service disruptions (strikes) can be organised in
a way that they affect decision-makers rather than service users – e.g. by
dumping waste in front of a city hall instead of leaving it piling up in the
streets. Another form of disruption, at least in the long-term, is the refusal
to collect service fees or to cut non-paying customers off the service. The
combination of traditional tactics and new objectives, as well as the
strengthening of the link between service producers and service users make
these strategies particular promising.